The most common way of making transfers for the application on textiles is by means of silk screen printing where each individual colour is applied to a sheet of silicone paper. Some colours, such as vinyl and plastisol colours, are heat-activatable, but are then not very fast without further treatment. To improve the fastness, the colours are usually provided with a hot melt granulate layer in the form of a powder or a fine-grained granulate mixed in an extender base, which is applied to the colours and serves as a special glue layer between textile and colours, thereby considerably improving the fastness. At high temperatures, however, e.g. during tumbling processes which use temperatures up to 140° C. in certain cases, they will get loose from the textile or a possible glue layer. Solvent-based two-component colours will be more stable against the action of temperature, but, when having been subjected to industrial washing and tumbling for an extended period of time, they will dry out and peel off from the textile.
The international patent application WO 92/07990 discloses a possible use of a colour copier with a two-component colour toner system in the making of a transfer for textiles. Such a two-component colour toner system, however, is not known in the market for colour copiers today. The present laser colour copiers use colour toners of a one-component thermoplastic resin type where no polymerization takes place. Furthermore, the system described in the above-mentioned international application depends on a colourless two-component extender base layer which is applied on top of the coloured image and, immediately when wet, is coated with a thermoplastic granulate which serves as a glue layer. This embodiment, however, can only be applied to white textiles, and the transferred image will only be sharp on very smooth textiles.
It is prior art to use colour copiers for the transfer of images to a thermoplastics-coated transfer paper from which it can be transferred by heat and pressure to white cotton textiles. The known products, however, exhibit great washing and cleaning weaknesses and thus just stand washing at about 40° C. for a limited number of times. The reason is primarily that the colour toners are relatively unprotected against mechanical impacts, and that they remain heat-activatable already at temperatures from about 90° C. Further, printing is only possible on white textiles, and only on textiles where the predominant part consists of cotton. If it is desired to transfer colour images of this type to dark textiles, up to several additional operations are required for the lamination and adaptation of a white cover layer below the colour toners. This process is both expensive and time-consuming, and it is moreover not possible to make configurative patterns, but only complete cover faces.